Performances

Tune of the Day: The Legend of Zelda Theme

World-famous video game music by Koji Kondo

The Legend of Zelda series, like many Nintendo games, has been noted for its use of music. Kōji Kondō, who has been described as the “greatest legend in the video game audio industry” due to his work for Nintendo, is responsible for much of the music composed for the series.

Here's what the composer said about The Legend of Zelda: “When I think about Zelda, it's an adventure game that comes to my mind first and foremost. I have to think about the feeling, the kind of brave or courageous feeling in terms of making the musical notes. At the same time, the general setting sort of European, with historic European towns and cities and things like that, from a long time ago. Yet it's not so defined, after all; it's an unusual and unknown world for everybody. If you are going to make music appropriate to a totally unknown town and unknown cities, you've got to come up with totally unusual music as well. In that sense I've been given total freedom and autonomy when it comes to the types of music I can compose, so what I'm trying to do is let players have the opportunity to listen to a number of different types of music, by sometimes combining the different genres of music intentionally.”